More than $1.1 million raised in one day for victims, families

11 p.m. update: The online fundraising campaign to raise money for the victims and families affected by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting is more than halfway to its goal after raising $1.1 million through late Friday night.

The Stoneman Douglas Victims' Fund page on GoFundMe.com has received contributions from more than 18,000 people in just one day. The Broward Education Foundation's goal is to reach $2 million "to provide relief and financial support to the victims and families of the horrific shooting."

Earlier Friday, the Miami Dolphins donated $100,000 to the fund, pushing it over the $1 million mark. The team made two entries of $50,000, since that's the site's maximum allowed amount per donation. The Dolphins also announced plans to host the high school's football team for an event at the practice facility in Davie later this year.

10:25 p.m. update: A white nationalist appears to have lied to The Associated Press and other news organizations when he claimed that the Parkland school shooting suspect was a member of his obscure group.

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania meet with doctors at Broward Health North with First Lady, Melania in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on February 16, 2017. (Allen Eyestone / The Palm Beach Post)
Photo: Allen Eyestone/The Palm Beach Post

8:50 p.m. update: After visiting victims and doctors in the hospital, the president and first lady met with first responders at the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. Trump was joined by Gov. Rick Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel for a press conference.

As of Friday afternoon, seven shooting victims remained hospitalized, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.

ORIGINAL POST: The Broward Sheriff’s Office had received 20 calls relating to Douglas High School shooter Nikolas Cruz in the past, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said during a Friday afternoon press conference.

Israel did not comment on the nature of the calls beyond saying they were for “various” reasons that the department now is investigating further.

Seven shooting victims remain hospitalized, Israel said.

Israel said Cruz never had a gas mask or smoke grenades.

In the hours after Wednesday’s shooting, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Cruz had those items with him during the rampage. Nelson said he received that information from the FBI.

Meanwhile, Rob Lasky, director of the Miami field office of the FBI, fielded questions about the recent revelation the bureau did not follow protocol after a the agency received a tip about Cruz in January.

“The potential of the FBI to make a mistake is always there,” Lasky said. “We do our best.”

The building, which is one of several on the campus, will be torn down and replaced with a memorial, assuming the school district receives funding from state lawmakers, reporter Jim DeFede said in a series of tweets Friday afternoon.

Roughly 900 students attended class in the building, and the school is already at capacity, DeFede said.

FBI DIDN’T INVESTIGATE TIP

Gov. Rick Scott on Friday said the FBI director should resign after the bureu acknowledged it did not investigate a Jan. 5 tip about Cruz’s gun ownership, disturbing social media posts and his desire to kill people.

“ Seventeen innocent people are dead and acknowledging a mistake isn’t going to cut it,” Scott said. “An apology will never bring these 17 Floridians back to life or comfort the families who are in pain. The families will spend a lifetime wondering how this could happen, and an apology will never give them the answers they desperately need.”

FBI officials said Friday they were contacted by a person who was concerned about Cruz before Wednesday's attack at the school.

Officials said in the statement that the information "should have been assessed as a potential threat to life" and sent to the FBI's Miami field office, but it wasn't.

"We are still investigating the facts," FBI Director Christopher Wray said. "I am committed to getting to the bottom of what happened in this particular matter, as well as reviewing our process for responding to information that we receive from the public."

Rob Lasky, the FBI special agent in charge of the agency’s Miami division, said Thursday that authorities also investigated a comment on YouTube in 2017 that was allegedly posted by someone with the name Nikolas Cruz.

“The comment simply said, ‘I’m going to be a professional school shooter,’” Lasky said, adding that authorities were unable to identity the person who posted the comment. "We do not know if it’s the same person. We did our database checks, we could not positively identify him."

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio said Friday it was “inexcusable” that the FBI failed to follow protocols.

Rubio said the bureau did not inform its Miami field office that people cluse to Cruz had warned the agency over a month ago of his “desire to kill, his mental state, and erratic behavior.”

“The fact that the FBI is investigating this failure is not enough,” Rubio said in a statement released by his office. “Both the House and Senate need to immediately initiate their own investigations into the FBI’s protocols for ensuring tips from the public about potential killers are followed through. Lawmakers and law enforcement personnel constantly remind the public that 'if you see something, say something.' In this tragic case, people close to the shooter said something, and our system utterly failed the families of seventeen innocent souls.”

Congressman Ted Deutch, whose district includes the high school, said it “appears that this tragedy could have been prevented.”

“The American people should be encouraged to say something if they see something,” Deutch said. “But we also must be assured that these tips will be processed swiftly and thoroughly so we can avoid future tragedies.”

STUDENTS PROTEST

Meanwhile, students at South Broward High School walked out en masse Friday morning, saying they refused to attend class to force lawmakers to confront calls for gun control.

About 95 students at the Hollywood school have participated sporadically in the protest, either chanting or holding handmade signs near an exit gate near the high school, according to a student.

“I would like to see, personally, after living and experiencing this, extreme limitation if not complete eradication of semiautomatic weapons and large magazines,” said Kurtch, who has worked as a culinary teacher at Douglas High School for the past four years.

During Wednesday’s shouting, Kurtch watched shrieking children tear through the hallways outside her classroom, pulled students into her room and frantically locked the doors. None of the students in her room were hurt, but they were just doors away from classrooms attacked by Cruz.

Sabrina Yuen, lost three friends in Wednesday’s gunfire — Joaquin Oliver, Nick Dworet and Meadow Pollack, all fellow seniors. Yuen’s father took her to grief counseling. “But what can you even say after something like this?” she asked.

“I’m not trying to put a positive spin on the fact that this town just took 17 bullets to the heart, but I’ve never seen this many people stop sending thoughts and prayers and start saying we’re going to show people in the midterm elections,” Yuen said. “It’s enough and people know it’s enough.”

“I will be leaving for Florida today to meet with some of the bravest people on earth - but people whose lives have been totally shattered. Am also working with Congress on many fronts,” Trump tweeted this morning.

The president and first lady Melania Trump are expected to arrive in Florida today to spend President’s Day weekend at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach.

Candles and flowers sat on the stage of the park’s amphitheater in front of 17 angel figures that held up doves toward a field where 17 crosses rested in the morning sun. The wooden memorials were covered in flowers, photos of the victims, cards to the dead, icicles of wax.

A therapy dog, a 5-year-old golden retriever named Bentley, accepted scratches from a young girl and her mother.

Workers tidied the memorials, leaving mostly everything but the debris that fell by the wayside: a tipped-over candle, tissue boxes that succumbed to the overnight dew.

"We're going to have to pressure-clean everything. This wax won't come off easy," one said.

Leonnardo Olivera didn’t know where to go or the right words to use when he got there. He was just hoping for relief.

“I’m trying to take these scenes out of my head, because they keep coming,” he said. “Even eating, playing video games, they’re still coming. I’m trying to do something that makes me calm.”

Olivera, 15, was in a darkened, shuttered classroom Wednesday as Cruz opened fire. His mind won’t stop replaying the dreadful day, from the initial shots he and his classmates heard to the bodies they saw as they ran out of the school.

“We saw people dead on the floor,” he said. “I see coach [Aaron Feis] dead on the floor. I know Jamie [Guttenberg]. I know Martin [Duque]. These people didn’t deserve to die.

“I used to talk to coach every single day, ask how he is doing. If I could go back in time and say, ‘Coach, try to not die, man …’ I don’t know, if I could have just helped him, it would be OK. Nobody expected it anything (like this) to happen.”

“It’s hard. I’m trying to recuperate myself, to get better.”

Cameron Kasky, 17, a junior at the school on Friday blasted the Republican Party for creating “a facade” that fatal school shootings like the one that killed 17 people at his school Wednesday are “normal, that this is inevitable, that we have to just take it every time and understand that it’s bad but do nothing.”

Kasky said he expects the deaths at the hands of a 19-year-old with an assault weapon will lead to either stronger national weapons controls or the ouster of elected officials who oppose them.

“I am absolutely certain that we are going to get the results we want from this,” Kasky, 17, said outside the school.

Hannah Carbocci, a junior at the Parkland school, said she was in her Holocaust history class when the gunfire started.

The 17-year-old said she hid under the teacher’s desk as the gunman shot through the classroom’s doors and wall. Several of her classmates were shot, including two who died.

“My heart is really aching,” Carbocci said Friday. “I just feel so horrible about what happened.”

The history class was in room 1214, one of five classrooms that Nikolas Cruz, a 19 year old former student at the school, is accused of firing into before dropping his AR-15 and fleeing the building by foot.

Cruz then went to a nearby Subway located in a Walmart, where he purchased a drink, law enformcement officials said. He also stopped at a McDonald’s, where he sat down for a short time, before leaving on foot.

Kevin Siegelbaum will never know if he could have helped Nikolas Cruz turn around his life, and in turn, save 17 others.

“But it would have been nice to have been given an opportunity to try,” he said.

Siegelbaum, 47, has taught special education at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High for 2 1/2 years, helping those students whom other teachers cannot. Siegelbaum knows better than to give up on such students because he was once one, first discovering he had attention-deficit disorder, then dyslexia, but nonetheless working his way through college.

“That’s why I became a special educator, to help the kids who are lost,” he said.

A man prays in front of flowers, candles and tributes on the stage at Pine Trails Park for the victims of the Wednesday shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 15, 2018. (Greg Lovett / The Palm Beach Post)

Siegelbaum didn’t know Cruz, the 19-year-old former Douglas student who police say confessed to Wednesday’s mass shooting. But Siegelbaum knew Cruz was one of the lost ones.

“You heard about him,” Siegelbaum said. “He wasn’t in my classroom, so as long as he wasn’t around, I always felt safe.”

He knows it’s a paradox, alternately wishing to keep a safe distance from Cruz but also lamenting that he couldn’t pull in Cruz close enough to try to reach him.

“Normalcy,” Siegelbaum said. “Something our shooter needed — to feel normal, for who he is, for all of his issues.”

Amid questions of Cruz’s mental health, there also are reports he may be autistic. Siegelbaum said Douglas High’s faculty “did everything that they could to help this kid.” Instead, blame the emphasis on testing in education, which doesn’t allow teachers to identify and maximize each student’s particular skills and needs, he said.

“Everybody’s different,” Siegelbaum said. “We have our own normalcy. We don’t talk about that from an early age. We don’t teach them to feel confident. If you can’t write, (then) teach them how to give an oral report. What can you do? How can you express that knowledge? Feel comfortable, knowing that you can do something. … I’m supposed to teach algebra to kids who can’t identify numbers. Explain the logic to that.”

Siegelbaum said other special educators are equally frustrated.

“There’s a reason special-ed teachers burn out so much,” he said. “We care so much.”

By Wednesday afternoon, the rage that had built inside Cruz manifested itself in carnage. Siegelbaum was not at Douglas, on a personal leave day that was jolted by a phone call.

“Turn on CNN,” a friend said.

Siegelbaum feared for his own students, who were on an opposite side of the campus.

“But I didn’t know that,” he said.

It hardly eased his pain. Moments before Wednesday night’s candlelight vigil at Pine Trails Park, Siegelbaum approached the amphitheater stage, shutting out thousands of mourners behind him. He lit a candle, kneeled and wept. Several times, it seemed Siegelbaum had composed himself, only to begin trembling and weeping again.

A few feet away, politicians were gathering to join clergy in leading the vigil. Once Siegelbaum composed himself, he said politicians are ignoring “the people that they serve.” He blamed national education leaders they appoint, saying, “Why are we being run by people who don’t understand education?

“It’s not about the gun. You want to take care of gun control? Let’s start with mental health, starting at an early age.”

Siegelbaum expects someone will eventually reach Cruz, even if it’s too late.

“This kid’s going to wake up one day and realize what he did,” Siegelbaum said. “He’s going to get help — hopefully.”